Chapter Seven
Sabrina
It had been five days since I’d cornered Phillip in his dressing room. I’d given him space, figuring he’d come to me, but he hadn’t. I was starting to wonder if he ever would. And after Damon had sought me out the day before to ask how Phillip was doing, I figured it was time to take matters into my own hands again. It didn’t feel good to tell Damon that unfortunately Phillip had yet to open up to me and, quite honestly, I was getting to the point where I was afraid he never would.
So I did what any sane, yet somewhat desperate and determined person would do – I cornered him – again. This time I showed up at his hotel suite when I knew he would be there alone. We were in Portland, and Cam, Dillon, and Van had gone sightseeing. I’d overheard Phillip saying he was tired and wanted to take a nap, so I figured that was my chance.
I thought about executing a sneak attack, like bribing the maid or the concierge to let me in, but then I decided against it. Phillip was already on the defensive where I was concerned, and sneaking around probably wasn’t the best way to prove to him that I was trustworthy. Instead I decided to knock on the door to his suite.
When he answered, he had his phone pressed to his ear. He sighed when he saw me, and I held up the bag of sandwiches I’d ordered from a local deli and had brought as a peace offering.
“Can I help you?” he asked me disdainfully.
“I brought lunch,” I told him.
He sighed, but he took a step back and let me into the suite. I was surprised at how little resistance he’d given me as he closed the door behind us.
I turned to face him, but before I could say anything, he said, “Just set it down over there. I have to finish up this call. You can wait.”
Then he disappeared into one of the bedrooms, and I was left unsure of what to do. I looked around the massive suite, seeing how good it was to be a member of Westside. They had the best of everything. I had a smaller suite one floor down that was fairly lavish, but it was nothing like what they were afforded.
After setting down the sandwiches, I walked over to one of the windows that swept from floor to ceiling, allowing a view of the entire downtown area of Portland. It was fairly breathtaking from that high up. I’d never been to Portland, and a part of me wanted to see the city, but I knew I had more pressing things to focus on.
From the other side of the door, I could hear snippets of Phillip’s conversation, but it was hard to tell who he was talking to. I heard the words ‘I’m trying’ and ‘It’s not easy’ and ‘I wish I could’. Then there was a lot of agreeing to something the other person was saying.
“It’s harder than I ever thought it would be, Leah,” he said then, clear as day, and I recognized the name.
It was the girl he’d been talking to when we’d been in the limo on the way to the Oscars, the one who Van had said he wished was his girlfriend. I wondered if that was true. From what I knew of Phillip Lawton, he didn’t really have girlfriends. He was more of a free spirit when it came to women, especially when he was on tour. But maybe there was something about this girl that made her different from the others, that made her special.
“Love you too. I’ll see you soon,” Phillip said a few seconds later.
I held my breath as I waited for him to emerge from the bedroom. When he didn’t come out right away, I wondered if that might be his tactic to avoid me. It might have been a self-centered thought though, because a few seconds later I heard something slam against the wall of the bedroom. When Phillip came out a few minutes later, his hair was disheveled, as if he’d been running his hands through it repeatedly, but he didn’t look as agitated as he’d sounded when he’d been on the phone.
He leaned back against the doorframe, crossed his arms over his chest and appraised me as he let out a long, slow breath of air. “You’re still here.”
I nodded, not exactly sure what to say.
“I thought maybe you’d given up on me,” he said.
I guess that was a fair assessment, considering that I’d backed off over the past few days, giving him his space, wanting him to come to me. Of course that hadn’t happened, and I wondered now if it had been the wrong thing to do. With the way Phillip was looking at me, with an expression that told me he was guarded and uncertain, I wondered if he was used to people giving up on him.
“That’s not my style,” I told him.
“You probably should have given up,” he ventured. “It would have been easier.”
If only he knew that nothing about my life had been easy. I’d been fighting since I was a kid. I wasn’t really sure how to do things the easy way.
But instead of telling him that, I just shook my head. “Nah, I think I’ll stick it out for a little longer.”
Phillip nodded, but he didn’t say anything. I took that as him agreeing to give me a chance, which surprised me. I’d expected more of an argument.
“So, how have you been?” I asked him.
He shrugged. “Alright, I guess.”
“The show is great this year. Not that I’ve had the privilege of attending a live Westside show before this tour, but when I found out we were going to tour together, I checked out a few of your performances online. This album is by far your best, and I love how much energy the show has.”
Phillip just watched me, not saying anything in response. So I kept going.
“Do you have a favorite song off the album?”
“I guess,” he said noncommittally, and I could tell he was being purposefully vague.
He was so good at hiding his emotions. Unfortunately for him, I was fairly good at reading people, so the more time I spent around him, the better I could tell when he was being genuine and when he was holding back.
“I like Lost to You,” I offered. “It’s really sad and pretty at the same time. It’s kind of hauntingly beautiful.”
I’d intentionally picked a song that I knew he had a larger part of singing, and his solo in the middle of it was one of the most beautiful things I’d ever heard. For as sullen and moody as Phillip was, he had a voice like an angel. His ability to hit the higher notes was unparalleled, which only made Westside’s sound that much richer.
“It’s a good song,” he agreed placidly.
“Did you help write it?” I asked him.
He shrugged and pushed off the doorframe. “We all did. What did you bring for lunch?”
“Sandwiches from a nearby deli and chips,” I said as I watched him walk over to the bag I’d brought. “I hope that’s okay.”
He turned to look at me over his shoulder. “I figured girls like you wouldn’t come within ten feet of a chip or processed lunchmeat.”
“Girls like me? What’s that supposed to mean?”
He waved his hand in dismissal. “You know, watching your weight so you can fit into those skimpy outfits you wear on-stage each night.”
I smiled to myself. “How do you know what I wear each night?”
“I’m not blind,” he said as he started unpacking the food.
As I watched him, I wondered if he’d watched any of my performances. For someone who treated me like I had the plague, I would have assumed no, but maybe I’d been wrong. I figured it was a subject I could broach at a later time. Phillip was finally talking to me, sort of, and I didn’t want him to shut down all of a sudden.
“I have a good metabolism,” I told him instead. “And I do enough dancing around on-stage each night that the calories sort of burn themselves.”
He nodded. “Good for you. Do you want turkey or roast beef?”
“I’ll eat whichever you don’t want.”
“What if I want both?” he asked, one corner of his mouth quirking up in a smirk.
I wished I didn’t find him attractive when he did that, but it was hard not to. He was too good looking for his own good, and after seeing him in the shower, I’d developed an unsettling attraction to him that I’d been trying to ignore. I told myself it was only physical, because his pe
rsonality was definitely something I didn’t find attractive.
“Then I’d tell you to go ahead and eat them both,” I told him. “I’ll get something later.”
“Interesting.”
“What’s interesting?” I inquired, taking a seat on the couch in the living room, making myself comfortable. It was a little cold in the room, so I wrapped my sweater around me.
“Are you that desperate to talk to me that you’d do anything I asked if it kept me from telling you to leave?” he questioned, and I actually wondered if he’d take things that far.
“No,” I said firmly, because even I had my limits. “Not at all. In fact, this might be the last effort I make. I’m not going to keep killing myself to reach out to you if you don’t want me to. If you ask me to go, I probably won’t be back.”
He nodded thoughtfully, seeming to be contemplating what I’d said. “Probably?”
“Yes, probably.”
“And what is probably based on?”
“How much you’re willing to give,” I told him.
“And what if I’m not ready to give you anything? Considering I still don’t know you any better than I did five nights ago when you busted into my dressing room, saw me naked, and teased me with the idea of coke – which I still consider to be an incredibly cruel gesture given the situation.”
I nodded. “Fair point. What do you want to know?”
“What makes you think I want to know anything about you?” he challenged.
I fixed a hard gaze at him. “You let me into your suite. You didn’t tell me to leave, and you’re about to have lunch with me. If you didn’t want to do this,” I said, gesturing between us, “even a little, you’d have sent me packing twenty minutes ago. And if you’re willing to give me a chance, I figure it’s predicated upon you feeling like you can trust me in some way. Getting to know me will help with that.”
“You sound like my therapist,” he told me.
I smiled. “Yeah, well, I’ve been in therapy for the past few years, so I guess some of that knowledge rubbed off on me somewhere along the way.”
“Did it help?”
That was a legitimate question. A part of me couldn’t believe he’d asked it, but I wasn’t going to let him see my surprise. I had hope for the first time that we might actually be getting somewhere.
“Sometimes,” I told him honestly. “Other times it’s felt like my therapist was giving me things to think about or focus on that didn’t relate to how I was feeling at that moment in time.”
He nodded. “They like to do that.”
“They do. I guess it’s harder to crack the mind of someone who isn’t you, regardless of how much training you’ve had. You get some right, and others are huge misses.”
“Yup.”
I wanted to ask him how long he’d been in therapy, but I was afraid if I pushed him even a little he’d close up on me. I figured it would be safer if I kept talking instead of putting him in the hot seat.
“You know what I hate the most?” I asked him.
“What’s that?” he asked as he walked over and handed me the turkey sandwich and one of the bags of chips.
He set his food down on the coffee table and walked back to the kitchen to grab two bottles of water. Even though Westside would only be at the hotel for a night, their suite was stocked with everything they could need. They wouldn’t touch a quarter of it, but it was there if they wanted it. My suite was the same way, although I wasn’t nearly as gluttonous with my rider as I’d been when I was a young, bratty, teen pop star who thought she ruled the world. I’d been humbled a few times over since then.
Phillip came back, handed me a water, and settled into one of the chairs across from me, watching me as he waited for me to continue my thought.
“I hate when they ask you a question you don’t want to answer,” I told him.
He nodded like he knew what I was talking about, but then said, “Like what?”
I figured he was trying to get me to share. And I’d do it if that was what it took for him to feel comfortable around me. I’d share all day long.
“Like when they ask you how you feel after your boyfriend killed himself,” I deadpanned, wondering if saying that was too much, too fast.
I’d thought about choosing a lighter topic, but I knew Phillip had to trust that I was in this for real. If I tiptoed around my own issues, how could he ever trust me with his. I had to go big.
“Your boyfriend killed himself?” he questioned as he took a bite of his sandwich. I figured he must not know the story of what happened with Jason and me.
“Not intentionally,” I said, pushing past the lump in my throat that formed whenever I thought of Jason.
It wasn’t so much that I was still in love with him or even that our love ran so deep that I’d been ruined for all men after I lost him, but it was more because of the reasons why he was dead. I blamed him. I blamed myself. And it still hurt to think about how fast he was just gone – gone from my life and gone from the world. It was like a knife to the gut every time I thought about it.
“He was high, and he decided to race his car out in the desert,” I told Phillip. “He lost control, and he flipped a few times. He was dead before the car stopped rolling. I know it was an ‘accident’, but at the same time, it wasn’t. Jason never should have been driving, and I didn’t stop him.”
“You were there?” Phillip asked me.
I shook my head, not ready to tell him where I was that night and why, because that was way too personal. Hell, I hated to admit it to myself most of the time, but regardless of where I was and why, I still felt responsible for Jason getting into his car that night. He’d been with me, we’d been fighting, and I’d told him to leave. We’d broken up a few days earlier, and I’d just wanted to be alone. He’d fought me on it, telling me he’d stay, but in the end I’d refused. So he’d driven out to the desert, had a little too much fun, and that was it. I never saw him again.
“No, but I should have been there,” I said vaguely. “We were in a fight.”
A fight, broken up – same difference. Back then we broke up and got back together constantly. We were always more fluid than anything else, always moving, and in the end, Jason got swept away, and I couldn’t grab his hand in time to hold onto him. He was my best friend, and I loved him, but I still couldn’t save him.
“I’m sorry you had to go through that,” Phillip said, sounding more sincere than I’d ever heard him.
I nodded. “Losing someone you love sucks. And it was what made me spiral even harder. I couldn’t handle his death. It was bad, but it was also eventually what made me decide to get help. For some reason, my therapist loves coming back to that night. She loves poking the sleeping bear if you will.”
“That’s probably because she knows it still bothers you,” he offered.
I nodded, knowing that was the reason. I was sure it was obvious to Phillip too. My emotions had to be written all over my face.
“You’re not eating your sandwich,” Phillip said to me, after a few awkward seconds of silence.
I let out a shaky breath, not realizing how much reliving the story of Jason’s death would affect me. It always did though, no matter how much time had passed.
I smiled at Phillip and unwrapped my sandwich, taking a small bite. I wasn’t really hungry anymore.
“Why did you start using?” he asked me.
“Because I could,” I told him honestly. “I was young, and it was available. I wanted to escape. Lots of reasons.”
“What were you escaping from?”
“My parents. My childhood.” I took a deep breath. “My dad left when I was ten, and my mom could never come to terms with it. She didn’t want to face that he was gone and why. After he left, everything just got really dark, even though she pretended it was fine. She dragged me along with her, and after a few years, I just needed a way out.”
I saw something flicker in Phillip’s eyes at what I’d just told him and wo
ndered what he was thinking. I wondered what he’d say if I told him the true story of what had happened to my family. He didn’t seem to know, but if he wanted to, he could find out. It was on the Internet, one of my many secrets that had been dredged up after I’d become famous, the tragedy of it all twisted into an explanation for why I’d gone off the deep end. And in a way my past had contributed to my downfall but not directly. There were too many other factors that had made me spiral when it was all said and done.
“You’re holding something back,” Phillip said after appraising me for a few silent seconds.
I nodded. “Yes, I am.”
“Do you want to talk about it?”
I shook my head. “Not really. Not yet. I think I’m done sharing for today.”
He nodded. “Fair enough.”
I was glad he was giving me an out. As much as I wanted to connect with him, I had my limits. Maybe in time, but not today.
“You want to try it?” I asked him.
“No,” he said definitively. “Sorry, but I’m not ready to do that.”
I nodded, knowing all too well how hard it was to face your demons. If he wasn’t ready, I couldn’t get upset with him for that.
“Okay, then do you want to tell me about Leah?” I tried.
“Leah? Why are you asking about her?” Phillip asked, immediately on the defensive, like I was snooping into a part of his personal life that he didn’t want me to touch.
“Because I know she’s important to you,” I said in as nonthreatening of a tone as I could muster. “I heard you on the phone with her earlier. I figured you might want to tell me about her.”
Anger suddenly flashed in his eyes. “You were listening to my conversation?”
“No,” I said softly. “Not intentionally. I just heard snippets. I promise I didn’t hear anything important.”
Phillip continued to eye me skeptically. “I wish you wouldn’t have heard any of it.”
“I know. And I’m sorry. I honestly didn’t mean to invade your privacy.”
I watched Phillip tear off little pieces of the paper his sandwich had been wrapped in, his eyes downcast, and I figured I’d hit sore spot.
Westside Series Box Set Page 87
